Manage your subscription

Clinic ‘turkey baster’ method may be worth trying before IVF

PUTTING sperm directly into a woman’s uterus may be worth a shot before couples with unexplained infertility try IVF.

The “turkey baster” method of placing sperm into the vagina has been around in some form since at least the 1400s. In improved versions of this procedure, aka intrauterine insemination (IUI), the sperm is first washed to lower the infection risk and fertility drugs may be given too. IUI is much easier than IVF, and often around a quarter of the price.

But the technique has fallen out of favour in recent years, in part because studies have shown that a single round of IVF is more likely to result in pregnancy than IUI.

Now Cindy Farquhar at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, and her team have found that IUI is much more likely to lead to pregnancy than we thought. The team compared three rounds of IUI paired with a drug that boosts ovulation against three months of trying to conceive naturally, in 201 couples.

Advertisement

The team told a conference of the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology in Switzerland last month that IUI seems to lift the live birth rate from 9 to 31 per cent in couples who have had unexplained infertility for three to four years.

This article appeared in print under the headline “Doing it the ‘turkey baster’ way”